We're spending more time than ever waiting on the phone for help. Photo / 123RF
How are you spending August? Feet up by the pool, sipping something refreshing? Or has there been a snag: Flight cancelled? Luggage lost? Insurance claimed? Indeed, has anything gone wrong with any product or service that you cannot fix yourself online?
If so, the soundtrack to your summer will probably not be the pop of cork from a bottle, but the pap of musical mediocrity droning down the telephone while you are kept endlessly on hold, desperately hoping a gloriously misnamed "customer service representative" will eventually pick up.
It is easy to mock. But it turns out that we are spending ever-more of our lives waiting on the phone for help. One survey from just before the pandemic estimated that Britons spent 26 days every year wasting time, with the top culprit being kept hanging around on hold.
And since then things have only got worse, after call-centre staffing collapsed, cost-cutting took hold, and for many frustrated callers seeking to make contact with companies, hold music replaced humans on the other end of the line.
As it does so, telephonic plinkety-plonk is becoming big business. Recent analysis suggests that "business background music", as it is known, is due to near double in size in the next decade, with revenues forecast to increase from an estimated US$1.9 billion ($3 billion) to US$3.5 billion ($5.5 billion).
The melodic mogadon prescribed to persuade us that a 90-minute wait is in fact a mere moment even has its own award season, when the Marketing and Creative Excellence awards (Marces) and their FIVE separate gongs for "On-hold messaging" are handed out.
Previous winners include the AA (in the "Most entertaining on-hold messaging" category) and – this is absolutely true – a jolly samba-themed number for cockroach control.
Not that all "business background music" is about keeping you on hold. It also includes, for example, the soothing string arrangements that subtly accompany you as you splash out in an upmarket restaurant.
But the two forms are inseparable. Far from its US Army-inspired inception, background music was about much more than filling silence, aspiring to manipulate moods too.
Today the melodies and messages we spend ever more of our lives listening to while waiting on the phone also aspire to such sophisticated control. Muzak no longer just wants to hold us, it wants to grip us and mould us to its will.
It was exactly a century ago, in 1922, that the form was born, when a distinguished veteran of the US Signal Corps, George Squier, developed a way of piping music down wires.
And just as photography was brought to the mass market by Kodak, Squier decided that the company to do the same with music should be called Muzak.
Not that it was primarily for entertainment. Muzak sold the idea that specifically tailored bursts of piped sound could improve productivity in offices and factories and, after the war, that retail tunes could convince shoppers to linger and buy more.
It took the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to push back against Muzak's entrancing blandness. Just as demand began to fade, however, a new market opened up: hold music.
It was born of a need to reassure business callers that they had not been forgotten by operators struggling to cope with ever growing telephone traffic. Hence the 1966 patent granted to one Alfred Levy for his "Telephone Hold Program System", which suggested playing "music, thereby to pacify the originator of the call if the delay becomes unduly long".
Since then, however, hold music's ambitions have extended far beyond reassuring filler. Muzak, so synonymous with that filler, declined until the company filed for bankruptcy in 2009. But in its place a host of companies have blossomed, suggesting that being put on hold is an opportunity not to be missed.
Among them is PHMG, born with a staff of two in Manchester in 1998, now with 32,000 clients in 54 countries and 680 staff. It offers not just hold music but what it calls a "complete caller experience".
Doing this well, though, is not as easy as it sounds, according to Rob Wood, co-founder of Music Concierge, the 40-strong Hertfordshire based company that specialises in creating "sonic signatures" for hospitality and retail brands: "The most important thing to think about is 'what is the objective of putting someone on hold?'.
Usually there's a call centre, and it has a certain capacity, so companies say we're going to digitise and automate as much as possible. And we want that process to be as pleasant and non-stressful as possible for our customers."
Not just any song will do. Far from it. Telephones deliver very low quality audio, through tinny speakers. Complex scores, or rich, layered orchestral music, can become harsh, scratchy, and indistinct – hence the prevalence of simple piano or electronic sounds.
Then there's pace. "Ideally," says Wood, "you want something fairly relaxed, to slow down, because people are stressed on hold. They don't want to be on hold. They're trying to get something done but they're busy. So don't overstimulate them."
Classics of the genre include Opus No 1, composed in 1989 by schoolfriends Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel. It became Cisco's hold music after Deel joined the IT giant, yet so perfectly do its simple electronic beats and melody exemplify hold music golden rules that it has since become celebrated far and wide.
Length matters too. If average hold time is seven minutes, for example, a two-minute tune on a loop is only likely to drive callers into a fury. Wood, a former DJ, says that the science of keeping callers on hold has evolved so much that, done well, it now no longer deserves its reputation for musical mediocrity.
In his old job, he says, he was concerned with "the mood of those on the dancefloor in front of me". Background music "is the same, but on a global scale".
One brand which seems to take that approach literally is Apple, which reportedly ripped out its own music for those on hold to customer service after complaints of shoddy sound quality.
These days, Apple allows those customers to be their own DJs, selecting songs from playlists, as they wait. Some of its sets have even made their way onto Spotify.
And hold music certainly can create stars through sheer exposure. In 2015, for example, the National Audit Office estimated that HMRC's jazzy, guitar-led number had been listened to for 4.7 million hours by the British public – more than the most streamed pop songs that year.
Sadly familiarity, for some listeners, only bred contempt. "I think the idea," noted one on the song's YouTube page, "is to reduce waiting time by sapping the caller's will to live and hoping that a high proportion will do away with themselves rather than suffer this torture any longer." As Rob Wood concedes, even a century after Muzak's invention: "If you get it wrong it still just annoys the hell out of people."
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